Enric Marco isn’t a familiar name in America but in Spain, he’s notorious. Marco was beloved on the Spanish left as a fighter against Franco’s dictatorship and a Nazi death camp survivor. And then, he was exposed as a fraud. All those inspirational stories he told school children, his address to Spain’s parliament, his numerous TV appearances, his role as spokesman for human rights—it was all an elaborate structure of lies based on a weak foundation of half-truths.
Spanish novelist and essayist Javier Cercas claims that he undertook his investigation of Marco with mental reservations. According to him, for many of his friends any attempt to understand Marco amounts to rationalizing the behavior of a man who let down the nation. Cercas even feared unwelcome correlations between the work of novelists and the tales invented by Marco. The delusional Don Quixote haunted Cercas and the author worried that comparing Marco to Spain’s greatest literary figure would only flatter the egotistical con artist.
The Imposter (published by Alfred A. Knopf) resulted from Cercas’ interviews, archival research, speculation and self-doubt. Rambling but compelling, The Imposter investigates the falsification of reality and the danger of self-delusion—not so much on Marco’s part but on the millions of Spaniards who had embraced his story.
In the late 1970s as Spain came to grips after decades of dictatorship, sorting out the heads-down, get-along approach to survival among most of its citizens, the nation needed a hero. Marco offered himself. In reality he’s played a walk-on part as a teenager in the Spanish Civil war but afterward caused Franco no trouble. The tales of resistance Marco told found eager ears after the dictator’s death, especially given his working-class, man of the people background and his gift for storytelling. He rose to leadership in the CNT, Spain’s anarcho-syndicalist union (in whose militia he enrolled during the Civil War), as the once outlawed organization reached its zenith.
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After the CNT disintegrated into factionalism in the ‘80s, Marco continued as an activist and decided to embroider a lie he told years earlier about his imprisonment by the Nazis. The truth: he volunteered to work in Germany under a World War II Francoist program, got in trouble and was jailed for a few months. Marco turned his brief sentence into a harrowing sojourn in hell. Once again, he caught the zeitgeist by the tail. Holocaust remembrance was on the rise, even in countries with few victims, and although Marco never pretended to be Jewish, he played his political card and posed as an enemy of the Reich, sharing a camp with Jews, gays and dissidents destined for the ovens.
Marco was as articulate as he was convincing as he told lies about the truth. His stories were enthralling and accurate as he spoke of the survival of human dignity under duress. His message was right but he was wrong to speak from experiences he never had.
The Imposter is less a biography of an untrustworthy narrator than a meditation on truth, history and memory. Cercas is correct to question the absolute credence given memories and eyewitness accounts in today’s society. Memories can be unconsciously constructed and eyewitnesses can see what they expect to see. “History gives sense to memory,” Cercas writes. Even when accurate, “Memory is a tool, an ingredient, but it’s not history.” A person’s memory is one piece in the mosaic of larger events.
In the end, Cercas doesn’t seem to know what to make of his subject. Marcos was an egotist, trickster survivalist who knew how to move with the times yet wanted to be a leader, not a follower. Maybe Marco is, as the author (more or less) concludes, “an enigma whose ultimate solution is that there is no ultimate solution, a transparent mystery that is nonetheless impossible to solve, one it is better, perhaps, not to solve.”
